23% of bachelor's degrees and 43% of master's degrees have a negative ROI | Hacker News Reader

23% of bachelor's degrees and 43% of master's degrees have a negative ROI

reason.com

193 pointsdelichon346 comments

One thing that I think doesn't get enough attention in these types of discussions -- not just this article about ROI, but also earnings disparities between (e.g.) genders and other groups -- is that income isn't the only measure of happiness.

Many people would take less money to do a job they enjoyed more. My older sister "gave up" a sales "career" to become a fiction writer. It's enough to pay the bills, but pays less than she could have had at a corporate job. She got an English degree and couldn't be happier with her choice.

My younger sister got a Theater degree and is a "struggling actress". Same deal: she's happy with her choice.

ROI is important for some aspects of the discussion. But it is not the whole story.

> earnings disparities between (e.g.) genders and other groups

When people talk about the gender wage gap they're not usually talking about the overall average, but rather doing like for like comparisons.

It feels like you're suggesting your sister chose to give up sales for fiction because there were other factors at play such as quality of life, that that is a decision men would be less likely to make, save therefore her actions have tipped the scale towards "women earn less."

But when people are talking about the gender pay gap they usually mean within a specific field or job title. So the comparison would be made between your sister and other men in sales, or between her and other men who left that career to go into fiction writing. In most cases the woman still earns less despite doing the same work and having the same work life balance (in theory; in effect she'll almost certainly be doing more additional domestic and other unpaid labour).

At least the version I hear most often about is a gross disparity between the genders without taking anything into account.

IIRC if you look into it it's mostly a maternity penalty anyway.

Which is also why a lot of the latest policies are to provide equal maternity and paternity leave. Which is pretty good anyways, why shouldn’t fathers be able to take as much time off?

I strongly support (m/p)aternity leave equality, but I can think of lots of reasons new mothers should be able to take more time off.

If your goal is gender equality, though, it needs to be equal, and we should encourage fathers to take the full time off as well. Otherwise, from an employer's perspective, women are ultimately lower-value employees, because they have an additional pool of time off they can utilize, while men do not.

Balancing that out gives one less reason to favor one gender over the other when it comes to hiring and assigning a salary.

One thing is the leave shouldn’t be “all at once or lose it” but a bucket that can be drained over time. The mother can use it very early and the father later which provides the best experience for everyone.

What if women are higher-value stay-at-home parents than men? Then maybe the optimal equilibrium is reached by more maternity leave taken on average by women than paternity leave taken by men… which produces an inverse result in the workplace.

This is contrary to the goal of equality.

It all hinges on whether or not sex/gender (and everything that comes with it) makes you more likely to enjoy and/or excel in certain roles. My gut feeling is it does.

If it does, then the goal of that kind of equality is a false goal.

If not, then you’re right.

It would be best if we gave parents the choice to determine what split is best for children themselves.

Right now, there isn’t really choice, because few countries have had equal leave rights, and those that do have had them for such a relatively short amount of time that we have no idea. So we haven’t been able to test any sort of hypothesis at all. All we have is culturally bound gut feelings, but if we just listened to those then we would still think that there are only four elements, that the earth is flat, etc.

And in the US we don’t even have legally mandated paid maternity leave, so even that would be a start.

Tell that to the women who are made to feel uncomfortable in their chosen work environments by men whose gut tells them they shouldn't be there.

No, that is not the kind of equality this discussion is about.

In this case, we are asking whether two hypothetical people who are completely identical in every way except for their genitals will receive the same opportunities, rewards, and treatment from their employers and their peers.

It is not for public policy to speculate on which parent will produce more value for the baby or the household by staying at home. The point you were responding to originally was this: If you mandate more parental leave for women than for men, you end up creating an incentive for employers to hire men instead of women (or choose to let women go when layoffs come around), because their benefits cost less.

That is the type of gender inequality we are talking about, and I hope you will agree that fixing it is not a "false goal".

I read the thread more closely and, you’re right, if men are not allowed to take the same amount of paternity leave as women, then that should be changed so that any person can take the same amount of parental leave. I didn’t realize that was not the case (I don’t live in the States). I was responding more directly to the notion that men should be encouraged to take the full leave / same amount of leave as women.

There is a lot of cultural pressure around men taking leave even if it is available.

Shinjirō Koizumi caused controversy when he took two weeks of his family leave as a minister because Japanese men never take it due to cultural reasons even though they are legally entitled to a full year of paternal leave. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/16/asia/japan-koizumi-paternity-...

And he was the son of a former prime minister, so even he was not powerful enough to be immune from criticism of this kind

While the details differ, the social benefit are mostly similar for both maternity and paternity leave. It create a better bond between parents and child, resulting in children that grow up more healthy and productive for society. Parental bonding take times.

In the news I mostly see or hear about the non-adjusted gender pay gap (women earn 17-21% less than men). The adjusted pay gap, which takes hours worked into account, is only 1-5% [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap

And that's across all ages, but as you go younger the wage gap actually reverses and women make more than men.

I think the argument is that women should be paid the same for doing the same jobs regardless of their age.

the issue is that if you are 10% less experienced than someone else because you took a year out of your career (imagining two people who started working 10 years ago), it is hard.

Climbing the ladder has inertia, anyone taking a sabbatical will be hugely adversely affected.

We should however destigmatise men taking parental leave in order to readjust this.

I will point out, however, that our society still prefers that men pay more than their share and many women have reported being uncomfortable out earning their partner. Obviously these conditions cannot coexist.

There's one thing you're missing here, and that is as women make up a larger percentage of an occupations' workforce, the wages start to go down with it, which is what happened or is happening with e.g. doctors and teachers.

Do you really expect employers to use their increased bargaining power in favour of workers? Of course doubling the number of workers in an industry is going to lower wages.

How are you relating this to the thread? Maybe you mean it takes time for capital to lower everyone’s income when market competition increases, the actual details of the excess humans matter less and less each year.

Artificial protection and gatekeeping by ordinance are there to protect those who got there first. Then we can blame others: women or immigrants etc, for wage depression. Unions do this less but still favor those who organized first.

If capital gets to hire for less, say that. Maybe the opportunity was an increase in certain pop segments, but they dont make wages go down. The people who pay wages do.

If you're talking about the difference at the aggregate level, it's mostly a difference in selected job types (eg STEM vs social sciences).

I'm talking about e.g. within STEM where a gap of both pay and position remains.

I'm aware of the pipeline issues for many STEM positions. Do you have any data on the pay gap by industry for the groups within STEM?

Which group would you like to start with? Data science?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/gender-pay-difference-field-d...

I'd perfer to see many positions within STEM so neither of us can cherrypick.

Do you have a real article with real data? This is just a post by some person on LinkedIn. It doesn't provide any background or support for the claims given. It even misuses the aggregate wage gap number from the BLS to apply at the job level...

"The term “gender pay gap” describes the disparity between what men and women earn in the workforce. Women earn, on average, 82% less than men do in the same job in the United States."

Perhaps you have some data from an authority like the BLS?

I guess it depends what you're reading, but the point remains that there's likely gender based pay gap within any given field/position.

I'm not sure where the "anyway" comes from in your last statement. The reasons for the disparity don't affect the reality that it's there.

It’s both actually, and you can’t be sure which measure someone is talking about unless you ask them. It’s quite common to hear people suggest that the gender pay gap is due to the fields women enter, rather than a disparity between pay within the same field. As with anything, there are different ways to measure societal issues, both macro and micro. I would argue that both are valuable for understanding the context and scope of the issue.

No, that depends on the speaker. Some talk within a job but from my anecdotal experience most do not.

> But when people are talking about the gender pay gap they usually mean within a specific field or job title

And they have to remember to avoid comparing the per hour earning at all cost.

"But when people are talking about the gender pay gap they usually mean within a specific field or job title."

I'm my experience, people usually confuse the two. There's rarely anyone pulling up BLS data for a specific job. We've even had presidents use the aggregate numbers misapplied to the specific level.

I've never heard of the gender pay gap meant as this very granular, targeted comparison.

On the contrary, I find that most data shared about this gap are just a lazy average of all men and all women earnings without controlling for stay-at-home parents, experience, diplomas, fields, etc.

That's true. I feel like the important bit is covering the essentials. 2x more is not 2x better, but you need to get above a certain threshold.

Incidentally this also holds for some engineering metrics. Some error metrics stop making sense after a certain threshold. E.g. if a certain error becomes disqualifying, doubling the error changes nothing.

Some study released years ago gave a USD value for the salary that was the happiness asymptote. Recent inflation has likely demolished that number, and I think it is an important one to know. It did not speak to the case of not needing a salary at all. The ability to be idle, or seelf direct however you want is very enticing, but I could see it going badly in a number of ways.

I think I have read that, IIRC it was around 150k?

When I read it it was 75, so maybe they did do the study again.

I don't know your sister so I won't comment on her particular case. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of these "quality of life" career choices often involve a partner - men, more often than not - swallowing the trash in a corporate job.

> swallowing the trash in a corporate job

My wife is an artist with a marketing degree. I love programming. Swallowing trash at work just feels less painful to me.

I doubt he disputes that men can love their work. It is just they have fewer options if they do not.

What options are closed to men?

Looking pretty and finding a sugar-mommy?

It is an option; I remember an article on HEMA that mentioned a participant who was idle and supported by his wife.

But it's a much more competitive option for men than it is for women. (That is, a man attempting to fill this role will face much tougher competition than a woman trying to do the same thing. It's not that the option is competitive with other options.)

I think it's well understood yes. When an option is only available to 1% of the population I believe it is fair to say that it's not really an option.

These types of discussions where people are very careful to be politically correct seem to always break down.

Of course you will find some outlier situation where one gender can do the same as another. This is not helpful and not the course of discussion. We're talking about what actually happens statistically, now and for generations.

Men are not the same as Woman, they aren't now, never have been and never will be.

I think men are looked down on if they go back to study, take an unpaid internship, become house-husbands (IE; non-breadwinners), exclusively attempt a creative endeavour (high risk enjoyable pursuits are seen as self-indulgent and lazy) or if they change career later in life (after 28~).

If I think the same of women, I do not believe that we would typically look down on them or consider them bad people in the same way for being somehow deficient in capability (IE; "a loser") or shirking responsibility if they decided to do those things.

In this sense, those opportunities can be considered effectively closed to them.

I went back to study, took on an unpaid internship, and changed careers later in life. It was awesome and it seems to make a lot of people who stuck to their first career jealous. You may look down on men such as me, but most people appear not to do so.

I admit I don't know too much about the house-husband or the creative endeavor.

I don't look down on you, I consider myself a bit more egalitarian in my principles than that.

Is your notion then that you did not face social stigma? That would be an interesting counter-anecdote to what I said, may I ask where you live?

I disagree. Granted, they are less likely to earn money on OnlyFans etc., but apart from that they can do the same things: they can be artists and do low paying jobs that they like.

What I agree though is that if they do chose a low-paying job, it might be more difficult for them to find a partner, which is not necessarily true for women. We are still by and large living in cultures where the male has to bring home the bacon ("a real man knows how to take care of his family") and it will take decades for it to change, if ever.

The phenomenon is cross cultural, meaning it's biological not cultural. Women tend to prefer men who can provide. Men tend to prefer women who are young fertile caregivers. Mythological stories across cultures reflect this general tendency. It's not something we made up recently or locally. It's a global timeless phenomenon.

Sad but true. The publishing industry (think Penguin books) is full of independently wealthy white women - “This unpaid internship is a fantastic career opportunity!”

Edit: disregard the comment.

Sadly enough, independently wealthy people are virtually the only ones who could actually publish consistently and thus possibly earn something out of the whole endeavour — under the assumption that any single book by an unknown / non-celebrity author has equal probability of being a hit.

Reality seems to be that most books are failures, publishers prefer celebrities as that reduces marketing costs, and they prefer established audiences.

This is a good read on the topic: https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

https://slate.com/culture/2024/04/book-sales-publishing-indu...

A rebuttal to that article.

Very interesting, thank you for the new knowledge!

Historically and today, a sought-after job for a young woman out of college who has majored in, say, English with wealthy parents is in publishing/media in NYC, with the parents paying the bills (publishing doesn't pay very much at the entry level). It's a genteel job that the parents can tell their friends about, and the daughter can meet suitable men; the classic marriage among these types has the husband working in finance and the wife in media.

Or possibly financial assistance from the Bank of Mom and Dad.

Aka non-state welfare.

This is my experience as well.

How often do you actually see people go „oh we have enough, we’re going to take lower paying jobs”? People work these jobs regardless of their partner's income.

I recently switched from a 15 year programming career to becoming an apprentice woodworker at an architectural millwork shop, and I could do it because I have a partner with income that can support us both. Might not be often, but it certainly happens

My father took a 1 dollar pay cut from 16 CAD/hour to 15 CAD/hour. Working in furniture repair he wanted to transfer from house calls (driving everyday) to in-shop repairs

My mother's a secretary (they call them administrative assistants now to be correct). She could advance her career by becoming a clerk, which mostly does more of the same, only more. Instead she's happy where she's at

I used to work for Microsoft. I left for a startup (peerdb) & while my pay didn't go down, that meant leaving behind >50k USD in unvested stocks & my salary growth at Microsoft was pretty fast (hired as junior in 2019, was one promo away from principal when I left in 2023) which I don't expect a startup environment to match

> Junior in 2019, was one promo away from principal when I left in 2023

I'm broadly unfamiliar with Microsoft's promotion culture, but this strikes me as incredible. But in the "something seems incorrect" sense of the word. Were you hired at an incorrectly low level, were you a one-in-a-million talent, or is there huge title inflation at Microsoft now?

Incorrectly low level (tho I'd like to think I'm uniquely talented too)

Had ~10 years of experience working at small companies (pointerware, mldsolutions) after dropping out of college (had internship with pointeware where I correctly guessed they'd hire me if I dropped out). Interviewed at Citus a week before they announced being acquired, got shooed in. Junior pay at MS was still 2x salary increase

That choice happens all the time, it's wild to me you never had it come up irl.

It's really clear when someone is invited to step up in their job and refuse because it would entice more working hours, but it happen as much when people leave full time position because it doesn't give them enough time.

Many promotions are actually pay rate cuts for salaried jobs. My job wanted me to work a 13% hour increase for a 7% raise.

Yup.

About two months into this job, they offered me a promotion since "you would be perfect for this position." I looked at the schedules of the people who also had that job and they were booked solid all week. It was pretty obvious to me that it would be basically 40+ hours/week of meetings and tons of stress for pretty much the same pay. The bonuses were probably higher, but nothing about it was worthwhile. Yeah, I like money but you'd probably have to double my salary for me to even think about it.

Had two successive managers suggest the job to me. After about a year, the newest one finally took the hint and left me alone.

Probably not that wild - we may live in different bubbles.

I did this when I switched from Real Engineering to Programming.

Took a 40k/yr paycut, but I knew my income after the experience would be higher.

I am planning to switch to 90% allocation from next year, which effectively means cca 50 days yearly of paud vacation.

We have 4 mortgages on 2 properties, by no means we have 'enough' (whatever that means). QOL is for me by far of important metric, especially with kids.

I can’t say I have heard of or know of a man who has done a “quality of life” career without either inheriting or getting rich first.

Widen your social circle

Underrated comment and great advice.

If all your friends and acquaintances look like you and don’t have differing perspectives, then you should totally widen your social circle.

Speak less, learn more. Ask questions.

Break out of the loop. Say no to the algorithm.

To be a little more helpful, I'll add that people DO take “quality of life” careers "without either inheriting or getting rich first".

Just ask your average gigging musician, writer, designer, and so on.

People who run "lifestyle" business and refuse to grow them outside a living income.

People who opted out of the rat race, from the start, or mid-career, and downsized, without being rich, to have more time with family, reduce stress, etc.

>Underrated comment and great advice.

useless swipe and naive advice, especially in this day and age. I can barely make friends who share my hobbies, what hope do I have in breaking the ice with someone completely different? I'm not going to specifically crash other meetups just to "expand my horizons".

>Speak less, learn more.

yes, that's why inroverts dont make as many friends, and are instead arguing with each other on Hacker News.

I know of one or two supported by a high earning wife. But it seems rare.

I started a video game company. We are making kingmakers now.

Best of luck with your upcoming release. It looks pretty fun. You seem to be getting some pretty decent buzz as well from a couple things I've seen elsewhere. You definitely have the hook down (modern guns versus medieval battles).

I think I'd be super happy with like, 10% of your buzz for my game's release (whenever that is, I'm only working on it part time), but it's a fairly small puzzle game (and still only programmer art at the moment) without a strong hook (it's just a sequel to an old free game of mine that did well in the past), so it has nowhere near as broad of an appeal, so it's to be expected.

What's your situation that allowed you to be able to go full time on the game?

I actually did a write up on this exact topic recently.

https://www.reddit.com/r/indiegames/comments/1bu3hlv/how_i_w...

Best of luck. I'm planning on doing the same in the near-ish future, without anywhere near as much buzz and no staff. I accept that I'll probably need to step back into industry if I don't make a huge splash. It's a rough industry.

I know someone who was a great EE and quit at about 30 to become a park ranger. He was even better at that and is still doing it 30 years later and he couldn't be happier. He always had a bohemian & ecological mindset so it didn't seem like a surprise when he made the shift.

Pretty much every faculty member at any university has chosen quality of life over getting rich. Most of them did not inherit or start out rich.

It's easy to find examples within a career though, if you find that relevant. I'm a (US) physician that chooses to work a federal government job rather than private / for-profit sector, making about half as much money in exchange for numerous QoL benefits.

Reminds me of Max Shulman's advice to aspiring authors: "Marry money"

[]

Men aren't supposed to make more money and the wage gap is in favour of women when you look at recent male vs female graduation rates simply because there are more educated women.

> wage gap is in favour of women

Hahahahaha… no. You can argue that the wage gap is an imperfect metric and that it can't take into account certain advantages but it has not ever been in favor of women.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/03/01/gender-pa...

I saw stats in the UK that for women who had not had kids yet the average pay was slightly higher in the same job than for blokes. Kids are the main thing that makes the difference.

You're talking about the adjusted wage gap, not the wage gap. The adjusted wage gap measures sexism on an individual basis — all else being equal. The wage gap measures sexism on a societal basis, this is where the "explained" parts fall away.

If 10% of the gap is explained by women having lower paying roles then that's good. Women aren't getting paid (that much) less for the same work. But it doesn't fix the issue of women systematically working lower paying roles or roles typically held by women being seen as less valuable.

The straight wage gap has never been in favor of women. "Men and women make the same when you control for the variables that cause them to make less" isn't as applicable when you're talking about group dynamics.

Not sure why your valid point is being downvoted. You also brought a source which most people don’t bother. Kudos!

Interestingly, for my older sister, the answer is yes. For my younger sister, it is no.

I agree with the point, though. It's more socially acceptable for a women to choose a lower paying job that she prefers.

Yeah, I'm a man working a low paying job that I enjoy. Almost everyone I know seems to look down on me for it. 'When will you get a real job', 'when will you start your career?'

Sorry to hear that. Does it affect your dating life too?

What dating life? I was at a grocery store today and wound up flirting with a cutie, but I don't make enough money to pay for myself to go out for dinner more than once a month. The expenses a typical woman expects (from my experience) are beyond what I can afford.

go for hippie chicks who like doing acroyoga in the park, they're cheap dates :)

Good for you! You should do what makes you happy and revel in the knowledge that you provide many different kinds of value and you yourself extract value from something you like doing in multiple ways. The way I think about it: no one else has to be me and work my job. Since im going to so the work then I will choose how and what I do so long as I can. It took time for me to build the emotional strength to do what I love and not care about what others think but working on that intentionally has brought so many unforeseen, manifold benefits that I wouldn’t change that path for any other opportunity.

Is it in Europe? I feel people would like it if you tell that you like what you do.

No, the midwest.

It has nothing to do with "socially acceptable", I think the parent was simply talking about even having the option of doing it.

Very easy to be an aspiring author/painter/singer/etc when you have a partner to pick up the bills with a "real job".

I want to find the equivalent of HN for healthcare, where I think you’d find a ton of women MDs and highly specialized nurses who are women expressing frustration with their adjunct or artist men. This community is not the whole story.

I had a minor procedure a while back - enough that I had to be put under - and asked my nurse if she was happy with her job. She said yeah, she loved it, but she made more money as a barkeep! I was completely shocked, especially considering the hours nurses are expected to work. This was a real nurse, not an aide. I think healthcare is a not-so-great career anymore, again because corporate profits are all that matter.

Oh yeah. Nurses and MD's are night and day in compensation. And I'm sure you've heard the teacher salaries as well by this point.

Skilled labor does not outdo the decades of gender conformity expected from these jobs.

Was she hot? You can make a ton of money as a bartender if you're an attractive woman.

Given that women generally avoid dating lower-paid partners, there's a good chance you wouldn‘t or that those people would be outliers.

Such relationships exist. But in no way are such anywhere as common as those relationships in which men earn more than women. And that disparity is primarily because, as IdiocyInAction said, women don't want to be in relationships with men who earn less, not because men don't want to be in relationships with women who earn more.

"because men don't want to be in relationships with women who earn more."

This on it's own may be a correct statement however as you phrase it makes it sound like this this is the defining reason.

It's not, there are anecdotes of (insecure) men not wanting this dynamic, but a majority of cases the opposite is true. Women seek men of higher value (earning potential), not less. Men seek youth/beauty.

You misread me. I wrote

>women don't want to be in relationships with men who earn less, not because men don't want to be in relationships with women who earn more.

Good luck finding that. Women tend to not be interested in men who earn less than they do. I think the closest you may find are women temporarily supporting their husbands while they finish their degree or something like that, but again, the plan is for the husband to become the main earner.

It is sometimes presented under the myth of "men threatened by women who have a big career", but I have never seen researches supporting that. Men don't care if women earn a lot, note that they don't prefer it, they literally don't care. It is not a criteria when choosing a partner. Women do care a lot though about finding a partner who earns more than they do.

Yep, at least in my case. My wife is able to pursue her fiction writing career full-time right now because I'm still working a corporate job. Just before deciding she was too burnt out and had to quit she was working a 130k/year proposal management job and self-publishing a book a year on the side.

Right now she's making a little over 1k/month with her fiction writing (and just recently started offering editing services on the side, which she's gotten a few customers already), so it's definitely been shock to our finances ($140k -> ~$12k), and our emergency savings have been steadily draining every month, although we have been able to tighten the belt on several things so it hasn't been as steep as it would if we had maintained the same lifestyle.

But she's a lot happier, and she's very talented, and she's had multiple millions of page reads on Kindle unlimited already and her books are highly rated, so hopefully this takes off (there are writers in her genre making hundreds of thousands, including a couple writers she's friends with, maybe she'll become one herself, although I'd be happy if she can get it to the point where it's like $60k/year).

I also wouldn't mind a break from my own corporate job so I can hopefully work on my own creative works fulltime as well (I code video games and design board games in my spare time), but obviously we can't both afford to do this at the same time, we'd be homeless pretty quick.

But yeah, in the meantime, I'm 'swallowing the trash' in a corporate job.

> hopefully this takes off (there are writers in her genre making hundreds of thousands, including a couple writers she's friends with, maybe she'll become one herself, although I'd be happy if she can get it to the point where it's like $60k/year)

That might be more difficult than becoming a runaway success. I don't think the distribution of author earnings peaks in the middle.

I can see that. A lot of things tend to be bimodal in their distribution. Let's hope she becomes a runaway success then :).

And if not, it's not like she lost her ability to do proposal management. If it gets to that point, I'm sure she could find a well-paying job again if need be.

She's got a lot more practice with those interviews than I do, in fact, since she would interview when recruiters contacted her with a potentially better-paying job even if she wasn't really looking at the moment, whereas I tend to ignore recruiters when I'm not actively looking (or at least debating if I should start looking).

Wow this tuned into a different narrative quickly. The above comment did not blame women for men’s plight but did not compare apples to apples. Gender pay gaps usually involve different wages for same work, not downgrades that all genders do.

The “great” thing about cutthroat paring down by groups like private capital in management is all genders get downgraded at the same rate. So equity will even out in the race to the bottom, and we can enjoy more balanced stories of men contributing less to the household income.

> Gender pay gaps usually involve different wages for same work

That's not true, the oft-touted statistics are "77cents on the dollar", which is taking median women's earnings when employed with median men's earnings when employed, without regard to hours worked or responsibility[0].

In fact when accounting for hours worked, years of experience, responsibility and before maternity age women typically out-earn men[1][2], though mostly in large urban environments.

I don't think anyone is blaming women here, but I think we should speak with factual information, lest we continue to propagate myths or erroneous talking points.

Please keep in mind that women seem to be disproportionately disadvantaged after having children, which is what the study from pew research concludes after noting the early advantage for women.

[0]: https://now.org/resource/the-gender-pay-gap-myth-vs-fact/ -- "By comparing differences in annual earnings between men and women, we find that there is about a 23 cent difference per dollar according to the Census Bureau."

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...

[2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/young-wome...

> Please keep in mind that women seem to be disproportionately disadvantaged after having children

That’s because children are a full time job — the hours, the energy required, but especially the cognitive load. If the woman takes on some or most of that responsibility, then any other job she has becomes a second job.

It should be noted in this context that women are individually more likely to have children then men. Men with multiple children with multiple women do not generally spend the same amount of time as the sum of all the women.

bro your comment hits a bit too close to home. my partner took her master's degree yet she couldn't find a matching job in our area. at the very least, she now has better grasp on some things that actually matter to our life and her input is really valuable for me. so all in all, it's fine I guess.

Well, my brother is a musician and rents a room in a large house. He doesn't have a sugar mama/papa, music pays the the bills because he's actually frugal. For decades my dad implored him to "get a job" but in his mid-40s he's still is still happy with his life. Some other working musicians have partners with a higher income, but many don't; it's more common for them to be happily single or coupled with other musicians.

If you don't like swallowing corporate trash, don't. If you want to bring somebody along on your quest for enrichment, recognize that your choice there is yours.

To chime in, I see a lot of women supporting their men as well, probably more often tbh. But yeah, one stressed out breadwinner, one struggling x isn’t that uncommon. For some reason I’ve seen a lot of breadwinners go into the trades rather than corporate

This point would have been better made without involving gender. Who cares if it’s more often than not the man? That’s completely irrelevant. Unless your point really was about the gender, in which case you should elaborate.

>Who cares if it’s more often than not the man?

women, to put it crudely.

>in which case you should elaborate.

what's to elaborate on? Women are much less likely to "date down" econmically than men. Hence, women are less often the "breadwinners" and as such may be more likely to either spend their time as a full time parent or chasing jobs for passions over compensation. These aren't novel phenomenon.

You may want to try widening your social circles if this is a recurring theme in your life. Making friends as an adult is hard and making intimate connections sometimes even harder. The best thing I did for myself and my dating/personal life was get involved in charity work. You get to give back, meet people and improve your community. Who knows —- you might even fall in love with your community.

I am currently celebrating one year since my last layoff with no real job lead in site. Plenty of dead end interviews despite 8 years of experience. I have some part time freelance work but it is not sustainable.

I literally lack the time and energy for free labor. I looked into it a bit last year and honestly, what I saw in the community was depressing. lots of healthcare for sick (often terminal) elders, homeless soup kitchens, and lots of work with kids (I hate kids). Maybe I'd help make the world a little better but I'd lose myself in the process.

The previous comment wasn't a personal reflection, I know I'm not viable for modern dating and I'm not puting myself out in the market. I was simply pointing out a persistent societal statistic. It's not really one localized to any location, demographic, or time period. It's always been true.

I’m aware of this but I still don’t understand what your point is. Some men are hard done by because they allow their partner to pursue a career which is unlikely to be economically fruitful? I want you to elaborate on what exact message you’re trying to deliver. I’m not being facetious, I really don’t get it.

There's not really a larger point. You asked for a clarification from the comment upchain (which by the way, was not me), and I explained the reasoning that may have it come up. It was a small aside, but the comment's main point was gender-agnostic: it's easier to pursue low paying passions when you have a safety net. Be it a spouse, parents, or a small loan of a million dollars.

You asked "who cares", and I answered "women" because sadly, yes. Financial status is a bigger barrier for men dating women than women dating men, which may affect why women feel less pressure to pursue a non-profitable passion when in a relationship. It's an answer that invites more and more questions, but I don't necessarily want to turn this into a modern dating thread.

Not necessarily a partner, parents are often where the extra income comes from. Though I suspect parents are more likely to support a grown daughter than a grown son.

yup. currently paying those bills now, or rather, every month.

don't love IT, but one of us needs to get enough cash to live.

I’m very curious - is your sister single? I ask because often low wage earners are being subsidized by their partner.

It could be looked at that way, or as a single-income house where the other partner is doing some supplementary income.

Even if technically true a single income household is rarely discussed as “one partner subsidizing the other” but once the other partner is earning something it’s a subsidy.

Yes, indeed. There seems to be a gender disparity in those choices. ;)

Sensemaking is at play here too. Resilient individuals will (consciously and subconsciously) adjust and retell their narrative in a positive way. This is done in order to mitigate the distress of making choices that were less-ideal, in hindsight, but were made with the best information they had at the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking

That doesn't make a difference here, because it cuts both ways. Someone who gave up on a lucrative career in order to pursue their dream job might retroactively rationalize their decision as the best one, but also, someone who gave up on their dream job in order to make more money might also retroactively rationalize their decision as the best one.

In the meantime, there's nothing inherently wrong about choosing to make less money in order to have a job that doesn't make you miserable. Or to put it a different way: there's nothing inherently virtuous about minimizing your happiness in order to maximize your wealth.

This could go the other way though. It's not just that you spent $Y on the degree, you also spent X years on the degree, which are years you could've spent finding that enjoyable career.

Or on this same point but from another angle, consider the ways you get into the higher end of the income distribution without a college degree. You either have family connections that let you take over a business, or you do something that comes with a big premium (walk on roofs, go up on ladders, move furniture, work construction).

If you didn't win the birth lottery that allows you to open door #1, you're stuck with the second option. Moving furniture or going up on a ladder aren't terrible when you're fresh out of high school. They are when you're 50, and you're going to be one of those that takes Social Security at 62, possibly after multiple spells of unemployment as you approached retirement.

I didn't win the birth lottery on #2 either; I've got some physical disability, though I have still done a bit of that type of work and if you think it comes with a "big premium" then your experience is very different from mine. Roofing is an incredibly simple job to learn for instance, and it pays little better than minimum wage. From my actual experience (admittedly limited to the South Texas market), blue collar jobs still pay like crap. The toll taken on the body actually seems to be pretty individualized; I know some men who seem to have no problem working into their 60's and I think that keeping active within reasonable bounds actually contributed to that.

My point is not that you can make a good income doing blue collar work (you generally can't) but rather that some people do make a reasonable income doing that type of work, and in those cases there's a good explanation.

> Roofing is an incredibly simple job to learn for instance, and it pays little better than minimum wage.

I can't speak to your area, but doing roofing on tall houses/buildings with a steep slope here pays much better than working on relatively flat roofs or one-story houses.

Yes, my experience is generally residential, but it also tends to be that risk is just one of the costs that blue-collar workers are expected to take; there is little pay premium for it.

Skill does tend to get some reward; I think I'd be inclined to go electrician if I had to. I think if one wanted to get paid the most, I'd look at plumbing because it both takes some skill (despite the "3 rules" joke) and is literally shitty. Personally I enjoy a bit of carpentry work now and again, but my skill is nothing compared to my brother, and he was never really able to put together a comfortable living despite his ability. Fortunately, he was able to get an engineering job (not the software kind) fairly recently and was amazed at the idea of getting paid for a day off once in awhile and having health insurance.

The key in the trades is striking out on your own as rapidly as possible; if you don’t get to that tier you’ll end up with a moderate income.

Yes. Trades == business. If you want to make a lot of money, you have to become a business owner.

I don't get your point. Negative ROI means you will have to earn extra money to cover the shortfall through some other method. In other words, it is a rich people's game. You either have to be rich already, or become rich afterwards.

Going on vacation has a “negative roi” if you only look at it from a financial perspective. That doesn’t mean that choosing to travel is always a bad idea.

Your anecdote actually makes sense because she is pursuing a career in her degree. She didn’t get a degree in Sales.

There is a easy way to measure happiness. Record level of women are on antidepressants. And there is significant correlation with education level.

And please do not argue "she is happy with her choice" and on antidepressant at the same time!

There are many reasons why one takes antidepressant, I do yet I love my job and I am happy with my choice.

I take them to manage anxiety caused by my wife metastatic breast cancer (at least it's was only oligometastasis and she had a complete response to treatment that she has to continue as long as the disease doesn't come back) and parkison disease.

I hope your wife recovers well.

But my argument is about broad statistics, single case does not prove anything.

Your premise assumes people on antidepressants are not like the GP's wife. We have no reason to assume people are less happy only on antidepressant subscriptions. It could be awareness boosts in mental health, it could be higher stressors because they have more responsibility.

> It's enough to pay the bills, but pays less than she could have had at a corporate job. She got an English degree and couldn't be happier with her choice.

My sister says something like this. She is horribly depressed and 'loves her job' and doesnt want to be like her dad who had a great paying job and retired in his 50s.

Humans are adaptable. Sales are a bit immoral, there are plenty of jobs that arent immoral.

and I know a ton of people miserable and stressed because they are buried in college debt. The fact the government has created a system where 18 year old kids can rack up massive debts that can't be removed via bankruptcy is insane. Changing that would instantly fix the system, colleges would have to prove ROI or it would go back to how it used to be for non-practical degrees(only rich kids wasted their time and money on them)

reading this makes me very happy to have done by university in France.

My tuition was 400 euros per year for undergrad and master's.

The other part of the story is a Master's degree is a good segway to a career change. So what if the cost is too high. I need a career change.

I imagine that falls into the chunk that did have a positive ROI.

My wife never completed undergrad. Worked her was to director level in the insurance industry. Hated it, got a masters, pivoted to something g she likes without any real pay cut (maybe for a year or two, but she’s now earning more than she ever would have in her first career).

this and also some people study simply out of curiosity about something.

> income isn't the only measure of happiness.

I recently asked my Greek teacher about if 2008 was as bad in Greece as American media portrayed. She said things were definitely not good from an economic perspective but life kept going on. Even though people had no jobs, you couldn’t find an empty seat in a taverna on the weekend. She pointed out the biggest difference she notices living in the US is that people prioritize money above all else. In Greece they prioritize having a good time. It really changed how I viewed the crisis and reminded me that cultural differences bias our judgements.

> She pointed out the biggest difference she notices living in the US is that people prioritize money above all else.

Something Jerry Seinfeld (yes, the comedian) recently observed:

> SEINFELD: In the seventies, this is the tragic turn of American culture. And this was explained to me by Mario Joiner who cracked this puzzle that I could not figure out what the hell happened. That money became everything. What happened because it was not like that in the seventies. In the seventies, it’s how cool is your job? How cool is what you’re doing? If your job’s cooler than my job, you beat me.

> BRENNAN: And no one said, how much are you making?

> SEINFELD: Oh, you’re doing okay. You’re making this? Yeah. Who cares? And Mario Joiner explained this to me. He said the eighties was the first time that young guys could make a lot of money fast.

> Never existed before. Rich guys were Aristotle Onassis, Andrew Carnegie, shipping, iron. You couldn’t make a lot of money fast in those days.

> And it has poisoned our culture to this day. It’s poison.

* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/05/seinfeld-on-when-mo...

I figured it was the exact opposite. It was the very slow start of when life started to get really expensive. by the 00's there was no time to just go out and pursue your passions, you needed to pay rent the next month.

I imagine a part of this is (among many factors) impacted the US very strongly due to the "out of the nest" mentality. If you were 18 and still in your parent's house, you were doing something wrong. And that mentality has only very recently started changing as university costs skyrockted (and thus commuting has risen) and rent became untenable for someone making minimum wage.

If your good times cause a crisis with long lasting consequences, that isn’t exactly a good thing. I could list a hundred example situations but there’s no need, is there?

> […] is that income isn't the only measure of happiness.

It may not be the only measure, but it is a very important part:

> One could draw a snap judgment from this analysis and conclude that money, in fact, simply buys happiness. I think that would be the wrong conclusion. Clever sociologists will always find new ways of “calculating” that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount. But the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity. They rise together and fall together. Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness. High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives. In this light, the philosophical question of what contributes most to happiness is just the beginning. The deeper question is why the trinity of happiness is so stratified by income—and whether well-being in America is in danger of becoming a luxury good.

* https://archive.ph/4ofJ6 / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/happiness-...

Irrelevant. The article is about ROI, not about happiness. Income isn't the only measure of, I don't know, longevity, calorie intake, hair color, number of children, etc., either, but we're not talking of any of those things.

Happiness is greatly impacted by the burden of large debts that hold you down. If you are not making enough to cover your expenses you will likely not be happy, even if your job is amazing.

The ROI explores that to some extent. You are right though, as long as you are happy that is what matter in life. Setting yourself up for long term happiness sometimes means forgoing some up front happiness though.

The actual data [1] doesn't seem to agree with the article. There's also usually a huge range of ROI for the same subject from different universities, and it doesn't give numbers of students, so (1) I suspect small sample sizes are skewing the data, and (2) it's impossible to find the percentage of students in negative-ROI fields of study or institutions.

> For bachelor's degrees, fine arts, education, and biology programs had the lowest median ROI, while engineering, computer science, and nursing degrees gave students the highest long-term rewards.

That doesn't seem to match the data. Based on average (over institutions, not students) ROI from the completed-on-time column, the worst are: Drama/Theatre Arts and Stagecraft, Library and Archives Assisting, Alternative and Complementary Medicine and Medical Systems, Theological and Ministerial Studies, Movement and Mind-Body Therapies and Education, Dance, Personal and Culinary Services, Other, Pastoral Counseling and Specialized Ministries, Mason/Masonry, Zoology/Animal Biology. Not too surprising except maybe the last one.

The top ROI are Biomathematics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology, Operations Research, Advanced/Graduate Dentistry and Oral Sciences, Mathematics and Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, Computer Engineering, Nuclear Engineering Technologies/Technicians, Marine Transportation, Petroleum Engineering. Again not too surprising.

Only 45/338 = 13% of fields of study have a negative average ROI graduated-on-time (17% including not-graduated-on-time).

[1] https://freopp.wpengine.com/roi-undergraduate/

You're comparing medians to means. The means are much lower due to the average being skewed upwards by the wealthy.

Edit: the averages are much higher than the median of course

Fair point. Excel's pivot tables can't easily do medians.

Edit: Actually, it's pretty similar with medians (via Python now).

The bottom 10 are: Drama/Theatre Arts and Stagecraft, Library and Archives Assisting, Movement and Mind-Body Therapies and Education, Dance, Alternative and Complementary Medicine and Medical Systems, Theological and Ministerial Studies, Film/Video and Photographic Arts, Personal and Culinary Services, Other, Music, Mason/Masonry

The top 10 are: Advanced/Graduate Dentistry and Oral Sciences, Nuclear Engineering Technologies/Technicians, Biomathematics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology, Operations Research, Personal Awareness and Self-Improvement, Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, Marine Transportation, Systems Engineering, Mining and Mineral Engineering, Computer Engineering.

One can enable the Power Pivot addin, add the data into a semantic model and define a DAX measure for the median on it.

Do you think that graduate dentistry is a bachelor's?

The people who collected the data categorised it that way for some reason.

Do you think they included that category in the analysis of bachelor's ROI, which is what you are doing, comparing it to their results for bachelor's.

Like sure, a professional degree in dentistry probably does have a better average return than a 4 year degree in engineering, but that isn't the comparison they made.

Look at the source. It's a Republican activist group supported by Avik Roy with multiple members of the Bush family listed as fellows.

I'd also like to know what the ROI is for countries other than the US, particularly ones in Europe, where getting a bachelor degree is significantly cheaper and cost of living (in many places) hasn't risen as much as it has in the US.

The government should make it illegal to require degrees to apply IMHO. If an employer can’t create a sufficiently good screening process that would select those who would have degrees anyways, then maybe they aren’t necessary.

They also need to stop gate keeping. Jobs like being an attorney inherently require some certification, which is fair. Some governments in the USA made it illegal to take the bar exam and become an attorney without going to law school. Same thing with doctors and Step 1/2.

If someone can pass without going to school, good for them. Massachusetts in particular is in clear collusion with schools, requiring school teachers to have masters degrees in education.

For some domains, like most software jobs, it might work. In India, you sometimes see children manning pharmacies. It's not because of child-labour, but because dad/mom is away and someone needs to look after the shop. India has laws against this, but so rarely enforced that in effect, one can run a pharmacy without a degree. I dread to think of how many clinics in small towns are run by people without degrees. Heck, we have even had lawyers and judges practicing without degrees. I know only about a handful of such cases because some scandals they got involved in made it into news media. But who knows how many such people are practicing even now!

I can generally agree with lowering barriers of entry, even if there would be some social stigma of having a doctor who didn't go to school. My reservation would be around ethics classes, but I guess I just don't know if any of the exams for lawyers or doctors have a set of questions surrounding ethics.

There's an ethics exam you generally need to pass to become a lawyer: https://www.ncbex.org/exams/mpre

It is an interesting idea.

The real problem though are the ridiculous cost of state run schools.

As someone who has been out of college for 20 years, I can't believe what my state school charges now.

When I graduated my school was a good value compared to private options. That was the whole point of a state school.

Now the same school cost 4X what it does and I don't know if I could even get in when up against so many brilliant Indian and Chinese students. I assumed when I went the goal of the institution was for a more educated population in the state. That was the point of the huge difference in price for instate tuition.

Now it seems like some kind of money making racket.

Afaik, state schools have lost a lot of budget from states (in inflation-adjusted terms) compared to pre-90s.

Consequently, they balance the books by taking on more foreign/out-of-state students (who they can charge much more).

At the core, though, it appears to be a supply and demand problem: there's a ton of demand for people who want to go to college, colleges don't have the resources (or interest?) to expand supply, and so they raise prices because they can.

State schools have also been wasting a fortune on gold-plated facilities. I was just at UCSD yesterday and it was ridiculously nice. This is not a responsible use of tuition and tax dollars. We need an austerity program. If that makes the state schools less attractive to top students and professors then so be it.

This is moreso a problem with government/not-for-profit budgetary processes and capex vs opex.

With government funding, it's use-it-or-lose-it. I.e. state legislature will definitely allocate it to something else next year, if they come in under-budget in a year.

Add on top of that that state schools have the NASA problem: they're effectively performing (to state legislature and donors) for their dinner. And big, splashy buildings (with dedication names!) impress both. And attract picky faculty and students.

With not-for-profit, facilities are one of the few allowed places you can dump excess cash.

I floated in another comment that government grant/loan programs should impose an ACA-style admin vs teaching cost cap on institutions for participation. Maybe for capex too?

What’s hilarious is cities like Washington DC going the other way and requiring degrees for child care while exempting current child care workers.

https://dcist.com/story/22/08/18/dc-child-care-workers-colle...

Wow they really want to make childcare unaffordable.

The natural evolution is employers pooling their recruiting criteria to not have a single company bare the burden. Then they outsource it, and you end up with private entities managing the qualification tests, and you're back to a system where you pay to get through the door.

We already have that for instance with employers requiring MS certification to be sysadmin with the full salary.

> We already have that for instance with employers requiring MS certification to be sysadmin with the full salary.

Hm, I’ve actually had good luck with specializing in Linux. Windows is a given, sure, but any time I’ve interviewed they glanced over my Windows experience and wanted to talk Red Hat.

An alternative solution we had in the UK - I think it's still going but I'm not up to date - is the Open University. It was a government subsidised study at home program that let anyone really get a degree for modest amounts of money and that could be done part time while working. The education was actually good too.

(update still going but not super cheap - about £21k for a degree. I think it used to be more subsidised)

I agree. So many jobs have “bachelors degree” in the requirements. Doesn’t matter what kind, just have to have one.

I believe companies use this to screen out lower class applicants, because if it had to do with skills a specific degree would be required. For that reason, I think the practice should be prohibited.

Filtering by school and degrees are indeed effective, there is strong correlation in performance.

The entry to lower should be cost of education itself, the degree should be free/cheap enough for someone to obtain if they are technical wise qualified. Time spent on a subject is evidence of investment.

Something that has bothered me for a while is the cost structure of college. At least at my school, everyone paid the same amount, plus or minus three or four thousand dollars. Meanwhile, a computer science major will earn on the order of double what a psychology major might earn, both as a starting salary, and that will compound over their careers.

This is also true of loans. There is one flat interest rate for (federal) student loans. That rate does not reflect the creditworthiness of the borrower at all. It doesn’t consider their major at all. Any intelligent lender would never operate this way; who would give both a computer science major and basket weaving major the same amount of money and claim (via interest rate) that both loans are equally risky?

We have the concept of prices to serve as tools to encourage or discourage people from pursuing ventures society needs (or, really, is willing to pay for) more or less. It seems to me that in the context of higher education the economics are fundamentally broken. This causes a lot of grief for a lot of people, who then claim socialized higher education is the answer. It might be better than what we have; I’m not sure. That said, I’m inclined to think the free market would solve a lot of the problems seen in the current student loan situation in the US. There would be no kids with low-value degrees in $250k of debt graduating with a job paying $30k/yr. That simply shouldn’t happen.

It seems to me that in the context of higher education the economics are fundamentally broken.

There are lots of examples of this type of situation in the U.S. Suburbia is subsidized through the road system. Gas taxes and vehicle registration aren’t enough to pay for the road system. K-12 education is subsidized by non parents. Police services are subsidized. There’s a ton of corporate welfare too.

There are some things for which a free market solution is advisable and some things for which it not advisable. I think education falls into the “not advisable” group.

Interest rates not reflecting the creditworthiness of the borrower is a design feature of federal loans. The idea being the government should at least subsidize loaning money to people for education.

In practice it just allows universities to raise tuition to the moon.

Exactly. Equality of opportunity, to the extent achievable, is important to preserve. But it needs to be done in a way that universities don't simply absorb any funding by raising tuition.

IMHO, we should start by taking the ACA approach on admin overhead.

I.e. If you want federal loans/grants to be usable on tuition at your institution, here's the administrative cost ("funds not directly spent on teaching") cap.

If you exceed that, then you must rebate students the overage.

>But it needs to be done in a way that universities don't simply absorb any funding by raising tuition.

Again, who's going to stop them? The government? No one in power has the incentive to change the system. And they wont until it's too late.

The federal and state governments, as primary funders, certainly have the power to stop them.

And the incentive, to the extent funding goes to private institutions.

>Meanwhile, a computer science major will earn on the order of double what a psychology major might earn, both as a starting salary, and that will compound over their careers.

So? Assuming a fair charge (not the US kind of exorbitant tuition), the costs are similar (salaries from professors, administrative stuff, buildings, libraries, labs, and so on).

You're not paying to buy a career, you're paying to buy an education.

>There would be no kids with low-value degrees in $250k of debt graduating with a job paying $30k/yr. That simply shouldn’t happen.

Yes. Or we could forbid poor people from getting their desired degrees altogether, what you describe is the same thing but with more steps.

> Or we could forbid poor people from getting their desired degrees altogether, what you describe is the same thing but with more steps.

We probably should.

There's little difference between "I graduated with an uneconomic degree, and then failed to get a job in that market and/or labored under student debt I'll never be able to pay off" and "They wouldn't give me money for an uneconomic degree".

If anything, the latter is kinder because it nudges the college student into either funding their own uneconomic degree up-front (if they can find the money) or making other decisions.

It's always seemed insane to me that we let 18-year olds, sometimes with little financial education, make decisions that will benefit or haunt them for the rest of their life with so little guidance. (And college counselors have very conflicting incentives)

It may be better to tackle this issue at the school level than to pick and choose what constitutes a valuable degree because that can change depending on what the market wants. What may be true at student entrance may be totally false at student graduation. Isn't this a solved problem in Europe? The state treats public colleges as a utility to invest in the population. So the schools may not be as glamorous but they are easily and cheaply available for people who want to put in the work regardless of major.

I guess the issue with college funding is: is it an entitlement or an incentive program?

If it's an entitlement, we could just give people money whether or not they choose to spend it on college.

If it's an incentive (buying a good outcome for society), then it seems fair that the funder has some say in what they're buying.

I've heard Canada does have a serious problem with oscillating supply/demand mismatch in their medical education funding.

But it feels like that could be smoothed by using look back averaging & creating a +/- % system vs a hard, "there are no more slots" one.

> Assuming a fair charge (not the US kind of exorbitant tuition)

The submitted article was about "American colleges and universities", so we have to assume the US kind of exorbitant tuition.

If college students didn't have to pay exorbitant tuition and take out massive student loans, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion about ROI.

>The submitted article was about "American colleges and universities", so we have to assume the US kind of exorbitant tuition

I know. My point was "EVEN assuming a fair charge, the costs for different degrees would STILL be similar (classrooms built and maintained, administrative salaries, campus maintenance, libraries, teacher salaries, etc)". So, why would you expect different degrees to charge different tuition?

>If college students didn't have to pay exorbitant tuition and take out massive student loans, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion about ROI.

@lumb63 was bothered about how different degrees are paying the same - which is a question not tied to the tuition being exorbitant or not.

And I think his point was to use cost of the degree to discourage people from degrees that don't make money.

What's a "fair" charge? Students don't pay all of the costs to run a university even in the US, and certainly not outside the US. Students don't pay any of the costs to run a public high school, after all. But a big problem nowadays is that students are paying a greater share of the public university costs, since the government is subsidizing a smaller share of the costs. If you go back 60 years or so, it wasn't the case. That's why Boomers brag about paying for their college education by working summer jobs and such, because they could! Unfortunately, college costs have become less socialized and more privatized.

Different degrees do have significantly different costs, though. To some extent, market forces govern professor salaries, and professors in different departments can make vastly different salaries. Still, universities distort market forces by bundling all of the "goods" into one big package. Imagine if there were separate universities for each department instead of one university covering every department. For example, there would be separate engineering and philosophy universities. The engineering university would have a much higher price, not just due to the higher costs of engineering professors and the materials required by the department but also due to demand for an engineering education. The payoff of a degree with greater economic prospects makes the students more willing to pay a higher price for the degree. (EDIT: One might argue that public universities artificially inflate philosophy professor salaries, for example, beyond what they could command without the help of the other bundled departments.)

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that universities should be run according to market forces. On the contrary, I think higher education should be mostly subdizied just like high school and lower education. My point is that "costs" are not inherently fixed. They're subject to economics, both supply and demand, and you can't ignore demand as a crucial factor. Thus, when we think in terms of the costs and price of a university education, I think it's very fair to consider the ROI.

>What's a "fair" charge? Students don't pay all of the costs to run a university even in the US, and certainly not outside the US

Outside the US yes. In the US, with what students pay (including the parts covered by subsidies and loans), they could run 2 universities, not just one!

Private colleges do exist outside the US, the students don't pay US college prices to study there, but they still manage to survive and be profitable. But the operating costs of US universities are absurdly high (because they can, not because they need to). Even the "a-list academics" with the huge salaries are more marketing assets to draw students in than real contributors to their education.

Even without the subsidies and loans, it should not be infeasible to have a university supported by tuition feeds and still be affordable and good. And with state subsidies it is

US universities are not coveted because they're so better, they're coveted because they give privileged access to the US market and in a vicious circle the US academic employments. It's where the money and prestige are at, that's their draw.

But kids studing in much cheaper universities Europe, Asia, and so on, come to the US and crush it, as graduate/post-graduate students, or working in IT or STEM. They oftensmoke US-born kid who studies as undergradutes in the US. So it's not like their much cheaper education and much cheaper universities were subpar.

And this means the US universities could also be much much cheaper and be good too. It's the incentives which are misaligned for that, not some impossibility...

> US universities are not coveted because they're so better, they're coveted because they give privileged access to the US market and in a vicious circle the US academic employments. It's where the money and prestige are at, that's their draw.

Of course. This was my point about the demand side of supply and demand.

> And this means the US universities could also be much much cheaper and be good too. It's the incentives which are misaligned for that, not some impossibility...

I didn't say it was impossible. Indeed I was talking about the incentives. You're almost making my point for me by mentioning that people are flocking to the US for economic opportunities, while US students are not flocking to other countries for a cheaper education.

When you talk about a "fair" charge, that can be understood in a number of ways. In terms of market price, what's fair in one country may not be fair in another country, because the markets are different, the supply and demand is different. Whereas if you're talking about fairness in a kind of moral or societal sense, I think it's fair to ask whether the price of a social service ought to depend in some way on one's income, in such a way that the wealthy beneficiaries of the system pay more than the poor. That's a legitimate sociopolitical debate, nothing strange about it, I'd say. After all, certain forms of college financial aid have always depended on those factors.

The prices thing doesn't work well here because 1) the government has intervened, and 2) it's based on debt - the price of which is also controlled by the government/central bank. It's a skin-in-the-game problem. If education was at least partially funded by equity, the investor in the person receiving the education, be it a private investor, company they'll work for, or even the university itself, would have taken on the risk for failure to produce any sort of ROI. I say partially, because I believe there is some merit in government subsidy for certain fields, but more of that should go towards reducing the cost of university facilities, on-campus accommodation, labs, libraries etc. rather than student finances.

The people entering the workforce with $250k in debt are mostly physicians. It’s mosrly people with $20–60k in debt that are stuck in underemployment (or didn’t graduate, so never got the salary bump to pay off such loans).

> There would be no kids with low-value degrees in $250k of debt graduating with a job paying $30k/yr.

Very few people incur anywhere near that much debt for an undergraduate degree. Getting into the $200k+ debt neighborhood generally happens from law school or medical school.

It's pretty common for students to incur that much debt if they get both a Bachelor's and Master's degree from private colleges. Obviously this is not a smart financial decision, and the federal government shouldn't be encouraging it with subsidized student loans.

"More than 800 people applied this year for roughly 72 spots in the film MFA program, which can total nearly $300,000 for tuition, fees and living expenses."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/financially-hobbled-for-life-th...

I did not end up taking these particular college offers, but ~10 years ago I had offers for ~$50,000 a year after financial aid from multiple colleges. In 2024 I wouldn't be surprised if the same offer to me would be $75,000 a year. The year after year price adjustments I've see colleges make are insane.

As an economist, I totally agree. Funding of high-return majors by good students should have rock-bottom interest rates.

The govt should only be stepping into the loan market if the market isn’t happening. (Not that the market is doing loans wonderfully, but there are some new innovators.)

The govt should be helping the poor and investing in strategic capabilities. But the whole loan market and helping school rob parents of as much as they can pay? No.

For those interested in this topic, I’d strongly recommend Bryan Caplan’s “The Case Against Education”: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th.... He does a much more thorough analysis of the value of a college degree than any other I’ve seen, including factoring in dropout rate, majors, meeting potential spouses, opportunity cost, university prestige, etc.

The summary aligns with common sense: college degrees are typically valuable, especially in in-demand fields and from prestigious universities. But the college dropout rate is around 50%, so many people incur the cost of college with little of the benefit.

If you’re a high schooler considering college, it’s worth it if you are “good at school” and so confident you can finish in four years and are going to a high quality state school or better. Otherwise, you’re better off going directly into the workforce.

Not just meeting potential spouses. Having studied psychology has helped my romantic relationships in odd and intangible ways. For 1, talking to women I didn't know was easier because while they couldn't relate to my programming interest, they could relate to my psychology interest. For 2, it was just easier to find someone given that you were in an environment were 80% of your students were female (me being male).

But what also really helped was knowledge on anxious/avoidant attachment styles or how intuition is works (I read a lot about Kahneman's research papers - not his pop science books). By understanding how intuition works, I was able to train it through meditation (I could get the academic sources but this would become a lecture). When I got a stronger intuition I could relate better to people in general that use their intuition as their default mode (something I never did as a kid).

Psychology also has helped me with some mental health issues long after I graduated from it. I was surprised because I wasn't that interested in the mental health aspect when I was studying it (I liked neuroscience and statistics). I recognize mental issues with myself early so I can start acting on it early as well.

This is the tip of the iceberg. My point is: I never expected these benefits. But they are very very real. Moreover, for some these benefits do not pan out this way. A friend of my also studied psychology and would've loved to have a girlfriend at the time but it didn't work out for him. In my case, it helped that I was a bit socially bold. I was socially insecure as well but it doesn't matter that one is insecure when they are socially bold (I can say that with hindsight, haha).

Your point cannot be echoed loud enough on discussions of college prices and debt forgiveness. Instead, the too responses on such articles are always someone ranting about the lunacy of putting yourself $115k in the hole for a Bachelor+Master’s of Social Work only to manage a Home Depot followed by someone else pointing out that people graduating with that much debt are almost all physicians (plus a few lawyers).

Dropouts, by definition, do not have the degree to earn that salary bump. Those who go on about rule of law and the sanctity of contracts or whatever are willfully blind to the point that forgiven or not, those loans to the dropouts aren’t getting repaid.

Heck, you can even see the same thing to a lesser degree for students who do graduate but with a 2.3 GPA (especially if it’s a field that de facto requires a Master’s).

What RoI misses is that an available, stable income is far more important than getting paid more than it was worth to spend. A master's degree may not be an advantage in an employee's economy, but when the table turns and possible employers get hundreds of applications, you may have a better chance making it past their filter with a degree.

You can currently see this being the case. Among the people I know that were laid off, ex-bootcampers and self-thought developers have worse chances getting application replies than those with degrees.

Negative ROI means you end up paying for the privilege of having your job vs not having the degree at all.

A negative ROI bachelor means you could work as a cashier and earn more in net than someone who gets an expensive degree and a job that is not paying enough to offset the student loan.

A negative return master means that you would earn more in net if you stopped studying after your bachelor. In other words, you are sacrificing your bachelor earnings edge to get a masters, which is why it is more common for a master to have a negative ROI. You're already "rich" after the bachelor.

In term's of crisis, life doesn't care about about averages.

This probably is the case when you only expect money as a direct return on your investment. The proportions probably would be different (I have no idea what would they actually be though) if we considered other things you get in return. E.g. development of your personality, social connections you make etc. You still have to do some work to convert these into money and happiness though.

I even believe educational institutions like colleges and universities are a waste of time if all you want is new knowledge you can apply - most of it already is available online either for free or for much less than what tuition actually costs. A university/college is a tool for social integration (through getting your knowledge formally recognized and through meeting new resourceful people) and the art of using this tool right is another skill most of the people lack and don't even know of.

I'm no fan of the Higher Edu Industrial Complex but this is correlation, or at best blaming the messenger.

- Different people have different ambitions and motivations. Perhaps some degrees attract ppl who don't see money as a key motivator? Yeah, given the cost of edu perhaps they should, but we all do things we shouldn't and shun what we should. The point is, we need more analysis before we start making new decisions on actions to take.

- Supply and demand. It's not the degrees themselves that are the problem but market assigning value to them. Hear me out. That is, we can't collectively brag about the number of college degress and masters degrees as a key metric of our edu success, and then turn around and say "Oh shit. There are too many of too many of these."

Put another way, even if you shift all the negative ROI degree people into positive ROI degrees the value of the positive ROI degrees will then degraded (and the negative will climb).

- Let's finally admit that the experiment of (politically driven) cheap & easy student loans was in many ways a failure; another classic example of what happens when the heavy thumbs of politicians manipulate markets. It's funny (read: silly) how to make homes more affordable the POTUS is canceling student debt. Dear Mr/Ms President...what happens to price when demand increases? That is, cancel debt will eventually increase prices of other things. Classic political balloon grab, classically missed by the media.

> However, where college students were enrolled also mattered when it came to ROI. For example, an English degree from the University of Virginia has a $581,925 positive return on investment—climbing to over $600,000 when only including students who graduated on time. In contrast, students at Virginia Commonwealth University—another public university—who majored in English have a negative $30,000 ROI, with just a $3,624 benefit for those who end up graduating on time.

Getting a good (first) job is key for igniting upward progression, and, as they say, it is not what you know, it is who you know (maybe outside of college grads going straight to FAANG by grinding leetcode). Being unfamiliar with either institution, I'd suppose the former exposes one to a better network.

20 years ago, a kid I graduated with when I got my BS in business administration went straight to an $80/yr job through his network. I was not aware enough nor lucky enough to make a network and I barely broke $30k on my first job and it took ten years for me to make $80k, and that took me switching careers to software development, where I've double that a couple times.

UVA is a nationally ranked, well known school, with extremely selective admissions.

VCU is an average school. It has some very good programs, but overall, it’s in the second or third tier of public schools in VA (UVA, VT, W&M at the top, followed by JMU, GMU).

Really all this study tells me is college is too damn expensive.

Was the ROI reflective of people producing English-degree work or some other industry?

I can imagine an English teacher does not have that kind of ROI.

Plus, the opportunities to double your salary or even get a +20% bump plateau pretty quickly. You might be able to do it early in your career, but let's say you're 15 years into your career making a great $200K/yr salary. You're not going to just suddenly find a company willing to pay you $400K/yr. My last job hop was for +0.5%. Even assuming an average year-on-year bump of 5% (taking into account job hops) is ridiculously optimistic.

The key is that first job. Compare someone whose first job pays $50k/yr to someone whose first job pays $80k/yr. Assuming both average that 5% compensation increase every year, their outcomes will be totally different. After 30 years, the first person will be making ~$200K/yr and the second one ~$1.2M/yr, and their lifetime earnings will be $3.3M/$12.6M respectively.

One thing that these kind of studies usually haven't counted is comparison of graduate income with their parents' income, which usually are highly correlated. This is why there are some claim that philosophy or art major have some of the highest incomes, people who take that major usually are high class already. If this study is somehow able to eliminate that bias, I bet even more majors will have negative ROI.

Which means more people should go into vocational style degrees or engineering if they want to have a positive ROI

> One thing that these kind of studies usually haven't counted is comparison of graduate income with their parents' income

This particular study actually does try to take that into account:

> I estimate counterfactual earnings for each program’s typical students, based on their demographics, socioeconomic status, academic ability, family background, and geographic location. [https://freopp.org/does-college-pay-off-a-comprehensive-retu...]

Ah, one really needs to read the referred article directly to know this. Nice to know that it's actually already accounted.

Still, I don't actually get how he counts the socioeconomic factor and get the "without-degree income"?

I couldn't find an explanation either. They mention a paper somewhere, but all the links just point to that Medium article which doesn't explain the methodology in enough detail to replicate.

There is more to having an education than earning a higher salary. An educated population is more resilient and more flexible. Want to solve the worlds problems, the big ones like extreemism or climate change? Start will a better-educated population.

How are they more resilient as someone without 100k debts ?

There is certainly an economic utility to a more educated populous, but should that cost 30k+ in debt? If the ROI isn't there and the purpose is a general one for the economic benefit of the nation, shouldn't the taxpayer bear the cost of that?

This is actually the case where I live (the Netherlands). It has pros and cons of course, balancing of which has over time put some restrictions on the usage of the system (both subsidized college fees and separate study funding).

I’ve heard this before, but would like evidence. While I agree that education helps for I don’t want to live in a simple hunter gatherer society, does having everyone trained in worthless degrees like a feminist perspective on underwater basket weaving really make for a more robust and flexible society? One thing I saw during the pandemic was appeals to authority. Seems like as we get more and more degrees, we box out what people are allowed to say because it’s in the wrong thing. This doesn’t seem more flexible.

Most degrees do not create an educated person. An educated person needs a grounding in science, history, philosophy, literature, and - especially in our new age of disinformation - critical thinking and psychology.

I studied one of the hard sciences, and while educated in this field, I was sorely lacking in many areas. Even with my training around scientific thinking, I was unable to clearly see the biases that were injurious to my clarity of thought.

Look at universities and you see students with unhinged political beliefs, based on wild emotion tethered to neither evidence nor reason. These are not educated people, and it almost seems like some of them may have been wiser had they not pursued higher education at all. Regarding climate change, most university graduates are frustratingly ignorant and unwilling to think clearly about the solutions.

It is imperative that schools teach critical thinking and provide a desperately needed grounding in various subjects, rather than pursuing the sole purpose of ensuring their students tick the correct boxes to pass their exams. If this system were present, few would benefit from university and the profit-seeking motives of these institutions could be brought back in hand.

(disclaimer: haven't been in university for almost a decade now so I don't know whats happening on campus right now) >Look at universities and you see students with unhinged political beliefs, based on wild emotion tethered to neither evidence nor reason.

Examples of which are? Genuinely curious and don't inherently disagree, but what are they and why are the unhinged?

>It is imperative that schools teach critical thinking and provide a desperately needed grounding in various subjects,

agreed, I think we have to remember that the education establishment is really just composed by people, so you have to be specific by what you mean by "grounding", if it means "they believe what I believe because I'm right and everyone else is uneducated" that doesn't sound like grounding, grounding is introducing ideas and allowing them to go into whichever direction that leads to, it's not called "guiding" it's called "grounding"

EDIT: quick thought, If by "grounding" you mean "normalization" in the statistical sense around a core set of beliefs, I would argue that's missing the point of education, educated people buy into beliefs from first principles, people shouldn't be buying beliefs through education

One example is people supporting terrorism; it shocks me that some people who claim to be feminists can support such an unthinkingly misogynistic group as Hamas. Of course, some genuinely care about the Palestinian people and don't approve of Hamas, but a shocking number seem to have not considered the issue at all. I want to be clear that Israel has problems and I'm not saying that they are perfect; it is a very complex issue but many are unable to see it with nuance. The group "Queers for Palestine" is farcical in its support of a state which would eradicate it without a thought.

Another is the unquestioning faith in trans ideology, which has been laid bare in the recent Cass review in the UK. Again, few are able to see the nuance that gender transition is absolutely helpful to a small number of people, but that the treatment has been unethical in some (not all) cases. I support trans people in general, and definitely want them to be treated with respect, but that doesn't mean that every autistic child who believes they are trans should go through irreversible treatments. Nicola Sturgeon (former first minister of Scotland, and a university graduate) fell from political grace after taking the stance that a male rapist should be allowed to be sent to a women-only prison, which she didn't even realise would be unpopular.

---

By "grounding" I mean that people should have an understanding of what has been discovered and postulated before them, so that they can form ideas of their own. If everyone starts from square one, they have to discover so much for themselves that they will rarely make any significant progress. Indoctrination is not the goal, and learning about the important thinkers of the past may lead to seeing the flaws in their thinking and developing improved ideas.

I could never reach the brilliance of Rousseau or Newton if I started from the point at which they did, but by building off their work, I can be much closer (though still very far away). We stand on the shoulders of giants.

>Of course, some genuinely care about the Palestinian people and don't approve of Hamas, but a shocking number seem to have not considered the issue at all. I want to be clear that Israel has problems and I'm not saying that they are perfect; it is a very complex issue but many are unable to see it with nuance.

Since I kind of knew we would be circling this I'll try and tread carefully, I agree nuance is important.

Let's look at this from an abstract, if "queers for palestine" is farcical it's worth asking, how has it come into being, there had to be something that engendered it (sorry couldn't resist), that the group even exists should immediately flag a question of "why" and if they are upset about something, what is that, and how did they arrive at that conclusion, I'd argue that there's just as much nuance in that that you might be overlooking. Clearly something has gone south for someone if a group on a different continent is agitating for them

As an adult who got nothing from school, drifted into jobs I didn't like, and eventually started a degree (long boring story) to try and get a better job, ROI is extremely important. I wanted a better life for me and my family.

As the father of a child about to head to university ROI for them is extremely important to me. ROI for my child however is not even a consideration because they want to do what they want to do and what do I know anyway, they already know everything. I hope they've chosen something that's useful though!

I also would have preferred a full list of courses to avoid if ROI was important.

> I also would have preferred a full list of courses to avoid if ROI was important.

Here you go, just sort by ROI: https://freopp.wpengine.com/roi-undergraduate/

I think it's interesting that the post mentions a higher average ROI for "students who graduate on time". The reasons why that might be seem like something that quantitative data can't easily explain.

The effect mentioned did not seem hugely material based on the numbers given, but it seems like it could be explained quantitatively rather simply by just taking into account the extra time spent out of the job market.

That could very well explain it, I hadn't thought of that so thank you.

Reasonable: "Let's therefore reduce the cost of education." Stupid: "Let's stop educating people."

agreed. as with most statistical analyses, the conclusions drawn can differ in some interesting ways, which is what should lead to further inquiries for research and hypotheses.

where one set of eyes sees higher education as unnecessary due to “low ROI”, another set of eyes may wonder if/how/why the cost of higher education has outpaced salaries of those whom it’s supposed to have served.

my sense (and its all intuition and not information based) is that we’ve had about 2 decades of rapidly increasing educational costs while support funding (grants, scholarships, state subsidization) has remained stagnant (or decreased), and incomes of graduates have not increased at the same rate relative to the cost of acquiring that degree.

these trendlines would be pretty informative if someone created them. then we could ask why …

I think 'Let's stop educating people' might be reasonable in many cases. Not all degrees have the same chance of producing useful results and some non-stem education is just anti-education or worse ideological brainwashing. Subjects like psychology, journalism, arts, history, English, and social sciences are heavily over subscribed - these fields are saturated.

It's very obvious to me that today's problems are overwhelmingly technological, biological, mathematical, scientific, industrial etc. Even within these subjects, there's a mismatch between the concrete problems seen in industrial practice and the abstract and simplified ones seen in academia.

I hear the 'but any degree will give you a well rounded perspective' kind of hand wavy arguments, but these are presented without evidence, and are unfalsifiable 'runaway arguments' that have no finish line - at what point do you stop and say we're pouring resources into the wrong areas and neglecting others?

Singularitarianism is the CS equivalent of ideological brainwashing. STEM degrees aren't immune. ( -Masters in molecular biology).

The explosion of mental health problems in the world and economic dysfunction are not STEM problems, and any solutions likely have their share of public policy as well as making life more enriching. Especially since it's smartphones and social media (technology), aided by the best psychologists money could buy to create addictive algorithms, that hold a good share of the blame for those mental health epidemics. With the rise of the sports betting industry in the US I can only see the financial problems for everyday people getting worse, but I'm sure that the masterminds behind it will blame individual people for not being stronger in willpower than their algorithms are at being engaging. Are we going to technology our way out of that, or are we going to be more mindful about how technology is used?

i mean honestly STEM is pretty over saturated too, at least at the junior level, which is what fresh college grads would be at. it’s tough to get any non lab job with a chem/bio undergrad. shit, a close friend of mine had a 3.9+ gpa, honors, did good research for 3 years in undergrad, did a bunch of other crazy shit and he still got denied from every grad school he applied to in bio, including the school we got the undergrad from. i did a degree in math and i was able to get a job but i also did two minors to be employable.

Also reasonable: "Let's reduce time+ money wasted poorly educating people"

It's fascinating how much of this reflects societal priorities in what to reward. That's made entirely obvious by "education" being one of the low ROI degree programs: teaching effectively genuinely does require a college degree, and society genuinely does need effective teachers! (The more students grow up with poor teachers, the more we waste our human potential.) But US society has chosen to pay teachers a low enough salary that it doesn't end up working out financially.

Absolutely none of this is about "students making poor choices"! Or at least, if every student made "smart" choices, we'd be left without anyone to teach our kids. (And in fact, that's happening, to some degree. My local school system has struggled to fill some vacancies for the past few years. And Florida, for example, has had such a teacher shortage that they've decided that military veterans and their spouses are mysteriously automatically skilled teachers even if they've had no training or college education at all. Paying higher wages doesn't seem to be considered an option.) I suspect that some of the other "low ROI" fields suffer in similar ways.

I’m curious for countries like mine (Netherlands) where a bachelor cost you €12k inc. books etc. (if you pay the maximum without studyfunding) As some vocational education profession is high in demand right now compared to some bachelor degrees.

Or countries where education is actually cheap. Wasn't Germany doing that for a while?

Studying most things in most places is free of charge in Germany. Generally there'll be a mandatory fee that includes a public transport ticket and some administrative overhead (~300-400€/6 months).

Where do you get those numbers from?

When I studied (2014-2018) I paid 100-150€/semester Slight trend upwards, might be 200€ now

And that was in Munich, which tends to be expensive.

At least in Cologne they're regularly hitting 300 (https://verwaltung.uni-koeln.de/studsek/content/studium/ruec...). Dortmund was about ~340 last summer semester (https://www.tu-dortmund.de/storages/tu_website/Dezernat_4/De...). The 400 was just an uneducated guess for more expensive regions.

Oh https://www.lmu.de/de/workspace-fuer-studierende/1x1-des-stu....

LMU down to 85 for Munich While that doesn't include a full Semesterticket, it's cheaper than Dortmund without

In Poland state universities are free. You only need to pay for books, and they're reasonably priced (i.e. the textbooks prices are not extortionate like for example in the US), like normal books.

For decades now politicians and others have brought up the correlation of higher education degrees with incomes and then making the claim that if everyone got a degree then everyone would get a high paying job.

But that isn't how it works. There are a finite number of these high paying jobs and they tended to be assigned to those with higher education degrees. But if the market is flooded with people with these degrees, it doesn't make the number of high paying jobs go up. It fact it may even make some of them pay less. But mostly they will just fill up and a bunch of people with degrees are left over. The more degreed people, the less likely they'll be to get one of the high paying jobs.

Another similar fallacy I also see and hate is the one about lower mortgage rates or easier financing making housing more affordable. It does the opposite! Because more people will be enabled to buy, they will bid on the finite number of houses and prices go up until they are unaffordable again.

I disagree about the "finite number of high paying jobs", and the "finite number of houses".

You can always build more houses.

As for jobs... have you noticed that thing where programmers tend to create work for other programmers? The creation of a database engine means now you need db admins. The creation of an open-source OS means now you have sys-admin jobs.

Docker/Kube get created, now DevOps jobs are a thing.

LLMs get invented, people become 'prompt engineers'...

in a post-industrial society, where you have an entire country being fed by like 5% of the population working in agriculture, the majority of work isn't 'necessary' - if all Rolex advertising executives were to disappear tomorrow, life would go on just fine. But somehow, people are willing to pay for these jobs, which creates a demand for jobs that help the Rolex ad execs live better lives (high end sports coaches, fancy TVs/electronics, annoying smartphone apps...), and then you have demand for those newly created jobs to have their own set of 'useless' luxury goods and services...

so long you have enough people handling the 'basic' jobs - food, construction/trades, clothing, there's no reason I see that would prevent the rest of the society from engaging in self-indulgent, overpaid intellectual work.

Well of course. University degree requirements in most jobs outside of academia are nothing but a scam - employers save massively: way lower training costs, you weed out people that can't hold a deadline or work under insane stress even before they ever become a financial risk for your company, and you can get around anti-discrimination and disability protection laws because academia acts as a very effective proxy to weed such people out as well.

There used to be a time where "you have to pay upfront to work" was classified as a red flag for scams, it's time to do that again. Especially when your average academic degree can cost north of 100k $ these days - it's madness that we expect people not even old enough by law to chug a beer to take on debt that can't even be discharged in a bankruptcy that is larger than a fucking house costs outside of urban areas.

Many academic programs in the humanities don't even admit Masters degree students. They admit only PhD students, and a Masters degree is simply a certificate you get for satisfying the pre-dissertation requirements on the way to the PhD. There's no independent value to the Masters, and anyone in those programs who leaves school with a Masters is essentially a "failure", because they didn't complete their doctorate, the true goal. So it would be no surprise that these have a negative ROI.

In these cases, you can't even get a non-tenure-track teaching position with a Masters degree, because there are already plenty of PhD graduates to fill the positions. (It would be interesting to see the ROI of PhDs, by the way.)

> analysis looked at how much students were earning immediately after graduation, as well as how much they were making 10 years later

The observation window might be too short to capture the full effect of education. IIRC the earnings curve peaks later for higher education.

100%! The immediately after graduation sample is particularly useless; it's not surprising that entry level jobs do not pay well. But the bulk of the ladder climbing that is made available to people with college degrees and not to those without happens after more than ten years. (I think this disparity is bad and ludicrous, but I also think that it's real.)

My masters was a waste of time. My employer paid for it though. I would have gotten farther in my career by using those school hours to just work extra hours.

My take is that they are useful in two cases:

1. Careers where there is an explicit barrier to further advancement otherwise.

The typical example here is the MBA, but this is also often the case in engineering, education, and nursing, of the fields I know people in, and I'm sure there are more.

2. In order to get your foot in the door in a different field.

I think this is more effective than it's often given credit for. It's really difficult to switch careers, and an academic program is a good way to both make initial connections and have a credential at the end that helps get past initial screening. This may well not show up as positive ROI in a quantitative sense, but I think that's because the calculation is failing to capture the (very high) value of choosing what you do with a very large portion of your time on the earth.

I think bachelor degrees can also be seen as a form of this career switching. The kinds of careers you can do without a college degree are different than those you can do with them. That difference is about a lot more than the level of pay.

I also think optionality is valuable, and never seems to be analyzed in these kinds of papers. My impression is that any college degree opens up a bunch of options that are simply closed to those without a degree, and doesn't close any existing options. I'd like to see an effort to incorporate the value of that increased optionality into these kinds of discussions.

As a gainfully employed person with a philosophy degree, I’m glad I chose a degree without obvious “career prospects” and wouldn’t exchange it for anything. Education is supposed to be about learning, not getting a return on investment. The desire to financialize every decision is so tiresome. Not everything needs to be about economics, and the co-opting of the university system for job placement is really the root issue here. Job training should be separate from a liberal arts education.

That said, the absurd costs of attending university need to come down. Hopefully as alternatives to university become more viable, the cost of doing an English, philosophy, arts, etc. degree will come down to more reasonable levels.

Historically two things happened in the US to make public colleges affordable. The first the State paid a much larger chunk of the tuition than they do now. The second is they had higher standards for attendance than they do now. Those who were good enough go into college. Those who weren’t paid for the their betters’ education.

> The second is they had higher standards for attendance than they do now.

Citation needed.

> In all, Cooper found that 31 percent of students are enrolled in a program with a negative ROI—meaning that "the earnings benefits of the degree are unlikely to fully compensate students for the cost and risk of pursuing post-secondary education."

So, "cost and risk". In finance there is a concept of RAROC = risk adjusted return on capital. To adjust for risk you obviously need to first be able to measure it. The more standardized the measure, the better.

How exactly do you adjust for career risk? You can put forward a reasonably looking definition and get any result you want out of your analysis. It will look like rigorous scientific analysis, but it's basically a number plucked out of thin air.

This isn't surprising. College was, historically, an outlet for the wealthy to pursue knowledge and understanding of the world. It only became a (very) expensive and virtually mandatory vocational program after World War II or so.

My friends and family constantly shared articles like this when I was getting my BS and PhD, telling me I was making a big mistake and would be in debt I could never pay off. If they really wouldn’t leave me alone, I explained that I was already working in labs as a paid researcher, and winning paid grants and fellowships- I was making more money as a student than they were in regular full time jobs, and took on zero debt.

In general, grad students at research focused universities are paid for research and teaching, and have all tuition waived.

The path of making money as a student researcher in science and engineering is available to anyone that is interested and able to learn: as an academic PI now, I help a lot of students do this.

Yeah, unfortunately I think I see a whiplash effect happening here.

I do think it's good that there is increased recognition that college is very expensive and might not be a no-brainer financially. I do think it's generally right that parents had been oversold the "golden ticket" thinking about college for a long time.

But now I see a certain part of our culture swinging this pendulum way too far, to whatever the opposite of "golden ticket" is. And maybe that could have even been a useful realignment, maybe if upper class and upper middle class kids were the ones buying into "your college degree will be useless", then this might bend the trend toward evening out the balance of power in society.

But no, of course that's not how this is working out. Instead, I see smart working class kids being turned off of higher education, making good money early in their careers, but then hitting walls at their organizations, which they can't advance past without a degree.

Agreed, college shouldn’t be seen as a no brainer- but, like most things in life, if you have a realistic plan, and clear goals it does make sense. Almost none of the value in college is from classes- but from the opportunity to work directly with experts in what you are interested in. You have to take the initiative to make that happen, it’s not automatically part of the curriculum at most schools.

The actual data: https://freopp.wpengine.com/roi-undergraduate/

Education is a process - let's stop making it an RoI.

People will stop making it an RoI once it costs nothing in both time or money.

Seems a bit harsh. Playing video games has no particular ROI (unless you want to go into creative arguments), but they cost money and take up time. Fulfillment, joy, wisdom, those are valuable even if you can't exchange them for cash.

The issue is probably rather the insane costs of education in some countries. If I had to go into debt for a big chunk of my life to study, I'm not sure I would have done it without a clear path towards paying that off.

Video games are leisure, and many are free in terms of money.

Video games are a poor ROI, young adults should minimize them and study or socialize (in person) instead. The opportunity cost is huge.

If you need a huge debt to get it ROI becomes important.

I disagree, especially in cases, where it costs you 100k dollars, and leads to years of debt.

If it is free, it is a different story, but not here in US.

In no place university education is “free”. There are different ways it’s funded, but someone pays for it one way or another.

Maybe, but paying your taxes doesn't put you in debt for decades.

This argument is old and outdated, In the US we pay high taxes similar to places with "free" services.

The US just spends it on foreign governments as opposed to its own citizens like Europe does.

And then lets the services like health care, prison and education be butchered for profit (that doesn't come back to the public good but feeds inequality)

The U.S. doesn’t spend most of its budget on “foreign governments”. The reason public services in the U.S. are so bad despite such high taxes is extreme inefficiency.

But the cost to the service user is what has bearing on the ROI calculation for those individuals. Different organisational funding systems have different interests.

Everyone understands this. People say free, as in "free at the point of use/consumption"

I think it's somewhat disrespectful to assume other people don't understand a pretty elementary economic principle

If we’re talking about an individual’s ROI ( as the article does ) without taking into account the overall economic benefits, then why isn’t it fair to call something free if an individual doesn’t have to pay for it themselves?

I wouldn't really call university part of education outside of a few specialized vocational degrees.

It's more a life experience, part of growing up (if you have the luxury of being able to afford it) - basically a half-way house between being at home and looked after by your parents, and being out in the job market having to be responsible for yourself.

At a bare minimum it then should also not be about making if for profit

The government should require that colleges track and post details about their grads. What percentage are able to sustain careers related to their degree and how much do both groups (in and out of the field) earn?

I really think transparency here might help restrain future tuition increases because only so many students are going to sign up for a six figure a year school where the grads earn half that amount.

> What percentage are able to sustain careers related to their degree

What does “related to their degree” mean? My degree is in English (Creative Non-Fiction) and I think, read, write, give/receive direct criticism, and finish things on a deadline every day — all key components of my degree program.

I’m in a leadership role at a marketing agency.

If you say that’s not related to my degree program, then I’d say that’s neither good nor bad. I graduated 20 years ago. How many people’s interests and abilities are the same at 45 as they were at 25?

It’s just useful information to prospective students. I went to music conservatories and I have at least four classmates who (like me) are software engineers. Others are lawyers or doctors and plenty teach music. Only a small handful of students at the elite conservatories really do the thing they went there for, whether that be playing in one or the major symphonies or touring as a jazz musician.

When tuition + room and board nears six figures I think young people and their parents should have easier access to the average salaries of grads and what careers they really end up in.

My code bootcamp from 10 years ago had way more transparency around this than colleges do.

Very few non profits are run by people who do not want to increase their own income and career prospects.

The end result of that is the organization as a whole is primarily focused in increasing revenue. Anyone who says "should we cancel this program due to the low job prospects for current graduates "will be ignored or fired by the people who would make less money in that scenario.

Some degrees let you earn more money.

Some degrees let you have more fun.

As a teacher I would have made more money never going to college and working in cars instead, but I live teaching.

I hear that doctorates in particular are fun degrees, not money making degrees.

The problem is when a college can lie to students or cut staff. They usually lie.

ROI of whose investment?? The parents? The federal loan forgiveness program that puts social workers in poor neighborhoods? In general, the student is not providing most of the investment, and the investors (parents, government) are probably happy with their choice.

CPA skewing data?

To become a CPA, you typically need enough hours that college offer a “5th year undergrad” program where you get a Masters in Accounting with just an extra 1-2 semesters.

I wonder if this is skewing the data either more positive or negative ROI

So 77% of bachelor's degrees have positive ROI (considering individual salary alone)?

Sounds like a very positive result, especially since public education is widely regarded as a long-term investment that benefits society as a whole.

Saw comments about education being worth more than the paid price, or guarding against economic troubles. All good points, assuming the education was not one of the largest new debts for thw buyer.

I mean, the stat, particularly for bachelor’s degrees, is pretty good. 77% net out positively. And if the degree is the price of entry to a field, then it can be “worth it” if you want to be in that field, even if the ROI isn’t worth it.

Thankfully most people don’t go around making every decision in their life based on ROI.

Degree has no bearing on interview skills and companies hire those that interview best - not the best fit

Not for the universities getting the sweet tuition money though

FREOPP is a conservative activist group not actually academic.

Should the “return” on education be purely monetary?

Analyzing ROI is interesting for a theoretical discussion but I think it doesn't make as much sense for the prospective student.

Any analysis of education must take into account the opportunity cost. But what is the opportunity cost? What would you have done instead? Maybe you would have worked. Maybe you would have gotten a different degree? Maybe a bootcamp? Maybe odd jobs while travelling the world? It's highly individual and variable.

So yeah I think the right perspective is to consider some scenarios - including how likely getting a job in the field is and what the pay would be if you got one - and then use that to make a decision.

I was surprised that "Engineering" makes ~35% MORE money than "Computer Science" https://i.imgur.com/xOu1qt0.png

I work at a giant Silicon Valley company surrounded in Computer Science coworkers. I do the Mechanical Engineering for the team. Most of them make at least double what I get paid. But, there's probably heavy selection bias in this area.

Honestly thought it would be worse

They were never supposed to be a financial investment. Modern American capitalism has ensured that green tint is all anyone ever sees

Non-libertarian-ghoul take: "77% of bachelor's degrees and over half of master's cost nothing".

maybe ROI shouldn’t just be measured by salary? lol

But you're missing the real point of university, which is to broaden your mind for the low price of 30-120k - and by that I mean pay to do the same thing as free courses online and then regurgitate exactly what your professor tells you for non-stem subjects.

> low price of 30-120k

Couldn't help but chuckle.

Edgy take, citation needed

Ask any current college student whether they think the content of their courses are actually worth the cost, or if they're just there to get the piece of paper at the end.

In my anecdotal experience, I would say about 25% of my courses are actually worthwhile and not total busywork. Even then, all of the information is readily available online anyway

Honestly, its hard to not see college like an obstacle course at times. Just arbitrary requirements with little relation to the real world you gotta complete just to show to employers that you could.

What's "edgy" about that comment?

That comment is a concise and literal description of what the North American college/university experience has been for decades now, if not much longer.

It does cost a relatively large sum of money to attend college/university in North America. Student loans, scholarships/bursaries, tax shelters like RESPs, and government subsidies wouldn't be so necessary and so prevalent if college/university was something that most students could easily afford.

Regurgitating information is literally the core of the North American college/university experience. The students attend class to hear what the professor/lecturer wants them to hear. The students then do assignments and mid-term exams to practice regurgitating that information. The students finish it off with a final exam that once again involves regurgitating that information yet again. Any student who puts in independent thought, or who doesn't repeat what they were told, will not do well.

As for a "citation", pretty much anyone who has gone to college/university in North America will know just how true that comment is.

Ironically, you could have proposed an argument had you taken your symposium-style philosphy classes. Instead, you find yourself on the wrong side of a “hot” take with no means to defend yourself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com